Top 10: Paul Klee

Paul Klee’s work invites quiet attention. Its symbols, lines, and colours feel more like a language unfolding than a statement being made. Born in 1879 in Switzerland to a family of musicians, Klee developed a visual sensibility shaped as much by harmony and tempo as by brushstroke. Over the course of his life, he traced a path through early modernism — drawing from Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism and beyond — but remained defiantly unpinned by any one style. His art balances wit with enigma, intuition with rigour, always asking the viewer to meet it halfway.

This top-ten selection gathers together ten prints that capture the range and resonance of Klee’s imagination. From sunlit gardens to cryptic architecture, melodic line drawings to symbolic patterns, each piece reflects a different facet of the artist’s restless vision. Rather than follow a strict chronology, we’ve arranged the prints to echo Klee’s own compositional playfulness — letting form, mood, and idea guide the rhythm.

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Rose Garden

1. Rose Garden (1920)

Klee’s Rose Garden is tender, labyrinthine, and filled with quiet magic. Painted in 1920 — the year he began teaching at the Bauhaus — the work feels like a dream remembered in symbols. Circular and floral motifs drift across a veil of faded reds and soft ochres, suggesting not a literal garden but a psychic space: a coded memory of scent, structure, and solitude. This was a moment of evolution for Klee — when ornament and abstraction began to entwine more fully in his visual language.

There’s something faintly mythological in this painting: a geometry of petals, perhaps, or a lost city hidden in a field of signs. Klee was deeply influenced by his readings of mythology and poetry, and his art from this period often hints at hidden narratives beneath the surface. Rose Garden balances delicacy with formal intention — and sets the tone for a journey into the many moods, colours, and compositional experiments of his lifelong search for meaning through line.

Twin Tower

2. Twin Tower (1923)

Painted during his tenure at the Bauhaus, Twin Tower (1923) reveals Klee’s fascination with structure, rhythm, and architectural imagination. At first glance, the piece feels almost schematic — grids, lines, and abstract forms layer like a blueprint. But this is no cold design: Klee’s hand is lyrical, painterly, and warm. The “twin towers” themselves are softened, coloured with earthy reds, ochres, and subdued greens — as if ancient structures are being remembered or reimagined through a child’s vision.

This was a period where Klee was actively theorising art — teaching courses on colour and form alongside figures like Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy. Yet Twin Tower demonstrates how his intellectual rigour never dulled his instinct for play. The painting hovers between a diagram and a dream — combining the rationality of Bauhaus geometry with the softness of memory. It suggests not a literal place but the emotional architecture of place: imagined, structured, and vibrantly alive.

Burggarten

3. Burggarten (1919)

Burggarten was painted shortly after Klee returned from military service in World War I — a period of internal reckoning and artistic evolution. Though he served in a relatively safe role behind the lines, the war deeply affected his worldview, and his postwar works often reflect a quiet introspection. In Burggarten, we see Klee’s painterly sensibility shift toward expressive colour, layered washes, and suggestive forms — the garden becomes both a physical place and a mental one, tinged with mystery and reverie.

What distinguishes this piece is its near-dreamlike balance between abstraction and nature. The leafy vegetation, dusky palette, and blocky architectural forms fuse into a semi-symbolic whole, recalling the visual language of fairy tales or folk art. Klee’s subtlety is key: there are no hard outlines, just a feeling — a sensed garden, half-remembered. This marks his movement away from pure representation toward a more psychological space, where memory, place, and myth dissolve into each other.

Sicily, Close to S. Andrea

4. Sicily, Close to S. Andrea (1924)

Klee was deeply moved by his travels through Italy, and Sicily Close to S. Andrea is one of several works that channelled the warmth and rhythm of the Mediterranean landscape into something uniquely his. Rather than depict the Sicilian countryside naturalistically, he distils its essence into a quiet arrangement of earthy tones and fragmented geometry — almost as if the land itself were a form of language. Hills, walls, rooftops and paths blur into symbolic forms, evoking not just a place but a lived experience of it.

Painted during his time teaching at the Bauhaus, the work reflects Klee’s growing interest in structural harmony — in balancing intuitive composition with formal design. Here, the abstracted grid and diagonal movement give the scene its calm strength, like the underlying architecture of a poem. There’s a softness to it all, too: muted ochres and warm greys laid in delicate washes, catching the Sicilian heat without ever overstating it. It’s a moment of travel, memory, and restraint, all quietly held in place.

Ruehende Schiffe

5. Ruehende Schiffe (1927)

By 1927, Klee had fully embraced a visual language that fused geometry, music, and metaphor. Ruehende Schiffe (or “Resting Boats”) presents a harbour scene reduced to its quietest resonances — a sequence of floating rectangles, tilted masts, and rhythmic spaces that imply vessels without directly portraying them. Klee captures rest not as absence, but as a poised tension: the stillness of boats that might drift at any moment, the lull before movement.

This painting exemplifies Klee’s unique synthesis of abstraction and emotional nuance. Its palette is marine but muted — teals, greys, and faded reds — and its composition pulses like a score, each form holding its place like a note in a chord. Having long been inspired by musical theory, Klee approached art as something time-based, layered, and internally ordered. Ruehende Schiffe embodies this principle beautifully: a seascape reduced to rhythm, a quiet port rendered as silent music.

The Harbinger of Autumn

6. The Harbinger of Autumn (1922)

Klee’s The Harbinger of Autumn captures an eerie, atmospheric stillness that feels both seasonal and symbolic. Created during his time at the Bauhaus, the work showcases his ability to fuse dreamlike imagery with rigorous design. A central form — part figure, part omen — seems to drift across the plane like a breeze through withered leaves, suggesting a threshold between worlds. The colours are rusted, yellowed, and earthen: evocative of turning leaves, cooling light, and quiet changes.

Autumn was, for Klee, more than a season. It represented a state of transition — a mood, a tempo, a thinning of veils. This painting functions like a visual poem, filled with suggestion but free of didactic clarity. Its sparse, symbolic language invites viewers to read into its signs: the face-like shapes, the skeletal lines, the weightless arrangement of forms. It’s melancholic without despair, abstract yet intuitively felt — a portrait of passage and pause.

Signs in Yellow

7. Signs in Yellow (1937)

By 1937, Paul Klee’s work had taken on a sharper, more urgent tone. Signs in Yellow exemplifies this evolution, where line and symbol dominate the field in a style approaching visual code. The painting is striking in its simplicity: a mustard-yellow backdrop punctuated by calligraphic signs, marks, and shapes that suggest ancient scripts or cosmic diagrams. It reads like a cipher — part language, part pattern, part improvisation.

This late period followed a turning point in Klee’s life: his expulsion from Nazi Germany and his diagnosis with a degenerative disease. These challenges, rather than diminishing his output, seemed to distil it. Signs in Yellow is infused with tension — a graphic directness tempered by play. The yellow here feels neither warm nor joyful, but almost electric, a backdrop to marks that tremble between whimsy and severity. This is Klee as communicator, prophet, and playful mystic, etching ideas into colour with meditative force.

The Vase

8. The Vase (1938)

The Vase belongs to a moment in Klee’s career when clarity and compression became hallmarks of his visual language. Painted just two years before his death, this work showcases his unique capacity to make even the most seemingly innocent forms resonate with complexity. The vase is rendered in clean outlines and flat colour, filled with stylised, almost anthropomorphic floral shapes. Yet there’s a rigidity to the composition, a deliberate tension between decoration and construction.

This play between spontaneity and structure was a recurring theme in Klee’s late work. Influenced by his experiences as both an artist and a teacher at the Bauhaus, he developed a formal grammar that combined whimsy with precision. Here, vibrant reds, pinks, and yellows pop against a darkened background, suggesting vitality against decline — perhaps even a comment on personal mortality. Like much of his late oeuvre, The Vase teeters between celebration and restraint, a small masterpiece of measured intensity.

Hot-Blooded Girl

9. Hot Blooded Girl (1938)

There’s a brazen immediacy to Hot-Blooded Girl that sets it apart from many of Klee’s works. Created in 1938 during his most prolific late period, the painting vibrates with graphic energy — a caricature of femininity rendered with deliberate crudeness and sly provocation. The figure’s wide stare, exaggerated facial features, and jagged lines speak less to sensuality and more to archetype — a volatile spirit sketched from memory, dream, or subconscious flare.

By the late 1930s, Klee’s battle with scleroderma had drastically affected his health, yet his work became bolder, more direct, and often more psychologically charged. This image, for all its raw charm, hints at deeper emotional undercurrents. There’s anger, humour, vitality — but also a certain tension. The rough textures and bold outlines speak to the artist’s growing interest in the power of signs and masks. Hot-Blooded Girl isn’t simply expressive; it’s reflexive — a mirror to archetype, satire, and the playful grotesque.

Musique Diurne

10. Musique Diurne (1940)

Musique Diurne (Daytime Music) is among the final works Paul Klee produced before his death in 1940. By this stage, his visual language had condensed into pure symbol and resonance. This painting embodies a late, lyrical refinement — soft curves, delicate glyphs, and radiant hues arranged in loose musical rhythm across the page. It reads almost like a graphic score: abstract notation for an imagined composition.

Klee had long been fascinated by the synaesthetic relationships between sound and colour, rhythm and form. A trained violinist as well as a painter, he often wrote of “taking a line for a walk,” suggesting a performative and improvisational philosophy behind his draughtsmanship. In Musique Diurne, this idea finds peaceful resolution. Despite the toll of his illness, Klee worked tirelessly until his final months. This piece glows with serenity and strange clarity — a final whisper from a mind still brimming with shape, memory, and quiet music.

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Paul Klee’s art resists easy classification. It wanders through moods and methods, from poetic landscapes to cryptic abstractions, never settling, always searching. What emerges across this collection is not a singular style but a sensibility — curious, musical, and deeply personal. These ten prints trace that journey: from early dreams and sunlit geometry to symbolic whispers made in his final days.

To view Klee’s work is to step into a visual language that isn’t about solving puzzles, but about sitting with them — allowing colour, form, and feeling to mingle freely. Whether drawing from nature, myth, architecture, or sound, Klee painted like someone in quiet conversation with the invisible. And somehow, even now, we still feel spoken to.